and, simultaneously, for self-transformation, individual and collective, personal and political—for more than a little while. On the other hand, when an individual or a society totally represses its ’60s, as Reagan’s America has managed to a remarkable extent, it becomes not just politically torpid but spiritually dead. Open-minded public space can be a place where we can remember and recreate the storms and dreams of the ’60s, and so bring ourselves a nourishment that, at all times, but especially now, we badly need.
I want to end this essay with Franz Kafka’s help. All along, I know, I have been trying to convince people to seek out suffering, conflict, trouble. Some readers will probably find this perverse and wonder why they should bring more trouble on themselves. Kafka can suggest a reason why: “You can hold back from the suffering of this world,” he writes, “you have free permission to do so, and it is in accord with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.” Open public space is a place where people can actively engage the suffering of this world together and, as they do it, transform themselves into a public.
This essay first appeared in Dissent, Fall 1986.
Buildings Are Judgment, or “What Man Can Build”
The current fiction is that any overnight ersatz bagel and lox boardwalk merchant, any down to earth commentator or barfly, any busy housewife who gets her expertise from newspapers, TV, radio and telephone, is ipso facto endowed to plan in detail a huge metropolitan complex good for a century. In the absence of prompt decisions by experts, no work, no payrolls, no arts, no parks, no nothing will move.
Robert Moses, replying to Robert Caro, The Power Broker
I’ve had to save you. You are interrupting my plans now … Never mind. I’ll carry out my ideas yet—I will return. I’ll show you what can be done. You with your little peddling notions—you are interfering with me. I will return. I …
Mr. Kurtz, in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls
and ate up their
brains and imagination?
Moloch, whose buildings are judgment!
Allen Ginsberg, ‘‘Howl’’
The political and cultural storms of the sixties enabled Americans to expand their minds in a great many marvelous ways. In some ways, though, our collective consciousness seems to have contracted and shrunk. For instance, it seems virtually impossible for Americans today to feel or even imagine the joy of building, the adventure and romance and heroism of construction. The very phrases sound bizarre; you probably wonder what’s the joke. Think of your gut response when you encounter something being built—a building, a road, a bridge or tunnel, a pylon or pipeline, a television tower, anything—your first impulse will almost certainly be to shrink back in fear and loathing. This impulse cuts across class, ethnic, generational, and ideological lines: Try it on your friends, your enemies, your parents, yourself; you can even try it on workers who depend on building for their bread and butter. It’s true, but not really relevant, that most of what’s going up today is both shoddy and brutal: Our recoil is too fast and too visceral to make discriminations; even on the rare occasions that something beautiful gets built, we cannot seem to see. We tend to think that everything around us must have been indescribably lovelier “before”—before it got “developed.” We idealize the past of our whole environment, the way Scott Fitzgerald idealized his primeval Long Island—“a fresh, green breast of the new world”—paradise, till Man came and ravaged and ruined it with his parking lots.
Our contempt for construction is so immediate and instinctive today that we hardly even notice it. In fact, however, it is relatively new; at least it is new as a cultural consensus, radically different from the consensus of a generation ago. Of course, it may not last, or it may turn out to be only an undertow rather than an overthrow. Still, we need to understand where it came from, how it happened, what it means. How have we come to condemn the process and products of construction as emblems of everything we find most destructive: massive ugliness, sordid venality, outrageous windfalls of wealth, endless storms of dirt and noise, big plans laying waste little people’s lives, organized viciousness without redeeming social value? How have millions of people who have never heard of Allen Ginsberg come to share his vehement judgment against the spirit “whose buildings are judgment”?
When I read Ginsberg’s Howl at the end of the fifties, his anguished vision of “Moloch, who entered my soul early” struck close to home. When Ginsberg asked who was the “sphinx of cement and aluminum,” the demon that devoured as it built, I felt at once that, even if the poet didn’t know it, Robert Moses was his man. For Robert Moses and his public works had a very personal resonance for me. He had come into my life just after my bar mitzvah, and helped bring my childhood to an end, when he rammed a highway through the heart of my neighborhood in the heart of the Bronx. When we had first heard about the Cross-Bronx Expressway, early in the fifties, nobody believed it, it seemed absurd, unreal. In the first place, hardly anyone I knew had a car: The neighborhood itself, and the subways leading downtown, defined the flow of our lives; the very idea of an expressway seemed to belong to some other world. Besides, even if the government needed a road, they surely couldn’t mean what the announcements seemed to say: that the road would be blasted directly through us—and, in fact, through a dozen solid and settled neighborhoods very like ours; that more than 60,000 people, working and lower-middle class, mostly Jews, but with many Irish, Italians, and blacks thrown in, would be thrown out of their homes. It couldn’t happen here, we thought: after all, this was our government, America, not Russia, right?
The Bronx of those days still basked in the afterglow of the New Deal: If we were really in trouble, we were sure our pantheon of liberal saints and heroes—Eleanor Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, Senator Lehman, Governor Harriman, our young reformist Mayor Wagner—would come through and take care of us in the end. And yet, before we knew it, trucks and cranes and immense machines were there, on top of us, and people were getting notice that they had better clear out fast, or else; they looked numbly at the wreckers, at the disappearing streets, at each other, and they went. Moses was coming through, and no political or spiritual power could protect the Bronx from him. For seven years, the center of the Bronx was pounded and blasted and smashed. When the dust of construction finally settled, and the exhaust fumes began to rise, our neighborhood was depopulated, economically depleted, emotionally shattered—as bad as the physical damage had been, the inner wounds were worse—and ripe for all the dreaded spirals of urban blight. Thus Moses gave me, and thousands of other New Yorkers, a crash course in the dynamics of power: what got built, and how, and for whose benefit, and what happened to the people who happened to be in the way. Moses was in the fullness of his power in those days.
Everywhere you looked, he was building something: A dozen expressways all over the state, slashed through the heart of the city and the country, leveling both; high-rise housing for literally hundreds of thousands of people, austerity barracks for the poor, opulent whited sepulchers for the richest of the rich; dozens of schools; a convention hall that loomed over Central Park; the biggest cultural center in the world at Lincoln Square; a new World’s Fair rising on the ruins of the old; Shea Stadium; at the mouth of New York Harbor, the city’s gateway, the world’s largest suspension bridge; far upstate, along the Canadian border, reaching a climax at Niagara Falls, the world’s greatest complex of dams and power plants. And all these projects were little more than beginnings for Moses, foundations on which to build more.
BIGGER THAN LIFE
What kind of man was this Moses? What made him tick? Where were the springs of his colossal energy
